How to live on your knees

IN Opinion | 25/01/2006

You don`t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala

In early June 1980, six months after the Congress came back to power after the defeat in the 1977 general election,  the Times of India wrote an editorial "beseeching" the prime minister to make her son, Sanjay Gandhi, the chief minister of UP because only he could save that benighted state.

Obviously, the sub-editor in charge of the page was revolted by the edit. So in the space reserved for the thought of the day, just above the first edit, he put in a quote saying it was better to die on your feet than to live on your on knees.

I don`t know what happened to that sub. The editor probably had him for breakfast.

But I do know that the Congress party has adopted that the notion propounded in that edit: licking the boots of the Gandhi family -- even when they don`t like it and are revolted by it and say so clearly -- is the way to go.

So we saw huge appeals, choruses, beseeching, near-fisticuffs, slogans and other endearing examples of sycophancy in Hyderabad where the AICC was meeting for the first time since it came to power in 2004.

Since I read these on a flight, I reached for my air-sickness bag.

Clearly, The Hindu which dislikes on the BJP more than it dislikes the Congress also felt the same way.

"It was left to the Congress president and her son to inject sense into this tamasha. Ms. Gandhi gamely appealed to the gathering to refrain from glorifying her…. Barely had the delegates recovered from the sternness of their president`s message than Rahul administered a further reality check. Young Congresspersons, he noted, were foot soldiers whose duty lay not in hankering for posts and power but in working on the ground… Will members of a once-great party reflect over the mismatch between their own conduct and the words of those they claim to worship?"

Worry not, as they say in North India. Congressmen are beyond shame.

That is roughly how the Indian Express also put it. "The reluctance to be coronated brought some sobering moments to Congressmen`s ardour for the young Gandhi scion, (which) were never far from spiralling out of control…the party has shown no signs of utilising the space afforded by the supreme leader`s loose embrace to set in motion a more robust political dynamic. And for this failure, the Family must also own the responsibility… In the last two years…the party has failed to show any significant revival in any state. The failure is at the level of vision and tactic, and at the level of leadership -- no structures of inner party democracy have been set in place… the party is actually counting on the inevitable rise of Rahul Gandhi."

The Pioneer was delighted, of course, that Congressmen were making such fools of themselves. Its tone was very different from the "All`s well, I am all right Jack" tone it had when the BJP had its jumbo meeting at the end of December in Mumbai.

"Irrespective of what individual Congress leaders may say in private, they behave in the most fawning manner when it comes to declaring their loyalty to the party`s first family... party elders, who have otherwise been rendered slothful by age, were amazingly energetic in demanding that Mr Rahul Gandhi be made a member of the Congress Working Committee... this despite Congress president Sonia Gandhi - the mother of their hope, their chirag - coyly asking her courtiers not to lavish praise on "individuals"…Mr Dasmunshi was so carried away by the urge to outdo Mr Singh that he described the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as "not just a family, but the beacon (of India), a flame of revolution..." Mr Dasmunshi is welcome to speak for himself and his fellow flatterers; he would do well not to speak for India. Nor should Mr Vyalar Ravi labour under the belief that he speaks for the people when he genuflects so cravenly at the altar of the dynasty."

At the time of writing this column the Telegraph and the Deccan Herald were yet to take a view. The HT`s view is well known. What the TOI says doesn`t matter.

Contact: Darius.Nakhoonwala@gmail.com